An Irishman’s Diary on strange times in Republika Srpska

Banja Luka is one of Europe’s more obscure capitals. The largest city in Republika Srpska – one of the two almost separate independent entities that comprise Bosnia and Herzegovina – feels more like a regional town than a European metropolis. Its 200,000 inhabitants live in the shadow of verdant, tree-topped hills. Life moves slowly; the busiest shops all seem to be bars and cafes.

Banja Luka’s squat skyline is interrupted by the 17-floor glass and steel “Republika Srpska Government Tower”, a rectangular box that looks like a Transformer taking a break mid-metamorphosis. When I visited recently, a guard with an automatic rifle slung over his shoulder stood in front of a pair of huge flags outside.

Inside the tower is the office of the president, Milorad Dodik. For most of the last decade, power in Republika Srpska had rested on the former basketball player’s broad shoulders. Dodik was prime minister for over four years and, since November 2010, has been president of this statelet of around one million people created by the Dayton peace accords that ended Bosnia’s vicious three-year long war in 1995.

Referendum

Republika Srpska (“RS” as most everyone calls it) is one of the poorest countries in Europe. Average annual incomes are around €3,200 and falling. Over 50 per cent of young people are out of work. In elections in October Dodik and his misleadingly titled Alliance of Independent Social Democrats lost support but hung on to their post in the state presidency. The RS leader has long vowed to hold a referendum on independence from the rest of Bosnia, potentially tearing apart one of Europe’s most fragile states.

“They say a referendum would solve our problems. Our problems would start the day after a referendum,” Aleksandar Trifunovic, a leading Banja Luka journalist, told me over dinner in an upmarket restaurant in the shadow of the hulking government tower. Trifunovic often plays the role of unofficial opposition in Republika Srpska. Earlier this year, Dodik publicly condemned him as a “traitor”. He was accused of working for foreign powers committed to destroying the Serb republic.

“If you are a journalist here and you don’t get a hard time then you are not doing your job right,” Trifunovic said as men in sharp suits and beautiful women in designer dresses sat eating plates of Krajina lamb.

Before 1992, about half of Banja Luka’s population was Serb, now it is closer to 90 per cent. As in the rest of the RS, many Muslims were either killed or forced to flee during the war.

One day, I rented a driver and headed an hour northwest of Banja Luka to the largely Muslim hamlet of Kozarac. Built at the bucolic foot of a sprawling national park, most of Kozarac was razed to the ground but has since been rebuilt. Fikret Alic is one of the few former residents to have returned permanently. Alic is possibly the most famous face of the Bosnian war – his tall, emaciated frame behind barbed war, his ribs pushing out like fingers in a glove, featured on news bulletins around the world. The picture became the iconic image of the conflict.

“That picture was taken accidently. Now I have made it my own mission to talk about it. I’m doing it for the innocent people who were killed,” Alic said as we sat drinking coffee in a local community centre. The walls were lined with hundreds of photographs of locals killed in the war. Some were as young as one or two, others as old as 101. All shared the same date – 1992.

Few of those who left during the war have come back for good. Instead they live around the world, in Germany and the US, Sweden and Austria. And in Ireland, too.

All Bosnian refuges have the right to return under the Dayton deal, but many feel unwelcome. The administrative centre for returnees in the city of Prijedor is housed in the same building as the headquarters of the local branch of the Serb Democratic Party, the party founded by Radovan Karadzic, the notorious Bosnian Serb leader who is currently on trial for war crimes at the Hague.

Bosnian Serb leaders continue to deny what happened in places like Kozarac. Officials obstruct attempts to locate the missing, refuse to recognise the massacre at Srebrenica and the killings at the concentration camps. “Milorad Dodik and Republika Srpska”, wrote journalist Ed Vulliamy, “play games that roll the bones of the dead like dice”.

During the war, Bosnian Serb forces destroyed all 16 of Banja Luka’s mosques. The most impressive, the Ottoman-era Ferhadija Mosque, is now being rebuilt.

Scaffolding surrounds the entire building, save the slender white minaret. The day I visited, the gate on the corner of the grounds was ajar. I slipped in and stood staring at the mosque.

A tall, thin man in blue overalls covered in white dust beckoned me over to the main entrance. Nearby a plaque, in English, said that “the burial ground and boundary wall were razed to the ground” in September 1993. Another workman stopped as I was reading. “Where you from?”he asked. “Irska”. Ireland. He smiled. “When will you be finished, with all this?” I asked, with a theatrical sweep of my right arm. He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows?”